Tag Archives: united states

The Library of Congress is to announce on Wednesday that Juan Felipe Herrera, a son of migrant farmworkers whose writing fuses wide-ranging experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity, will be the next poet laureate.

The appointment is the nationâ€™s highest honor in poetry and also something of a direct promotion for Mr. Herrera, who was poet laureate of California from 2012 to 2014.

The Senate released a 528-page executive summary of its study on the CIAâ€™s detention program, more than eight years after the secret overseas prisons were shut down. The report rejected many of the agencyâ€™s claims on the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques.

The Committee to Protect Journalists just released their first ever report on press freedom in the US. For those who have followed the administrationâ€™s policies, court cases and actions related to leaks and the press, the report doesnâ€™t contain a lot of new information.

What it does is weave together each of the cases and strategies the administration has pursued, surfacing key themes and illustrating that these examples are not aberrations, but part of a coordinated strategy.

Presenting this bigger picture reframes the debate over press freedom in America and reminds us that we need to demand a major course correction.

There is much to love about the Internet. But there is much, as well, to dislike — and/or to be annoyed by, and/or to resent, and/or to mistrust. In late June, the Q&A community Mancx decided to put numbers to those Internet-borne vexations. The firm conducted a survey of 1,900 American adults — adults who self-identified, it’s worth noting, as people who specifically search for information on the Internet. A group full of shoppers and cat-picture-seekers might have yielded different results.

Per Mancx’s numbers, however, the Internet as an information source leaves a lot to be desired. A whopping 98 percent of respondents don’t fully trust the information available on it. Which is a good thing, overall — skepticism! — except that 94 percent of respondents also noted the many negative effects that the Internet’s bad intel can have.